Braille in the 21st Century
JAREK: Hello, I'm Jarek Urbanski. I'm here to tell you about some ideas on teaching Braille in the 21st Century. Children with sight interact with technology every now and then. Thanks to the visual interface of all of the surrounding devices, they do interact with technology naturally. They experience through actual response. They developed concepts on the technology. They can solve problems. Coordinate hand and eye and hand and sound. May blind children achieve the same. With the regular technology it will be quite difficult. There are some tools however that can help. This machine here called Mountbatten Brailler Tutor and allows to achieve wonderful things like scribbling. (machine printing) Experiencing trial and error. Listening to what was typed. ROBOT: Space. About. JAREK: Erase and edit. Learn new concepts of word, line of text, paragraph of text and page. Find out what cursor is. And even (INAUDIBLE) and navigating throughout the page. This is important for the teacher or parent to be able to work with the blind student. Even if the teacher or parent doesn't know how to write braille. An embedded visual display and wireless connection to popular mobile devices makes it easy to communicate, send and collect assignments and even work remotely with the blind student. In the future, blind students will use refreshable Braille terminals And these devices, pages, and paragraph concepts get lost in a way. It is crucial that they understand them before starting to use the complicated devices. This acquaintance is important to communicate with the sighted peers later, too. They will keep talking about pages, paragraphs, and lines. An important concept for learning is gamification. The games included with the tutor will do the job. I hope the presented ideas will help you to teach Braille in the 21st Century. Thank you.